Indexed by:期刊论文

Date of Publication:2018-01-01

Journal:INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADVANCED MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY

Included Journals:SCIE、EI、Scopus

Volume:94

Issue:1-4

Page Number:1041-1059

ISSN No.:0268-3768

Key Words:Topology optimization; Conformal cooling system; Injection molding; Boundary element method

Abstract:A topology optimization approach is developed to design the conformal cooling system for injection molding in this paper. During the design process, the cycle-averaged approach is used to simplify the analysis of the cooling process, and the boundary element method (BEM) is adopted to solve the governing equations and calculate the sensitivities. The optimization starts from the complicated network of channels, and the radius of each channel section and the location of each node are selected as the design variables. The topology of the cooling system can be modified by deleting excessively thin channel sections. We pick out two representative example models with areas that are hard to cool to test the effectiveness of the proposed optimization approach. The results show that our method can improve both efficiency and uniformity of the cooling process.